*(Via USA Today) – African-Americans now rank race relations as the most important issue facing the country, according to a year-long study.
In June 2015, 13% of African-Americans named race relations as the biggest issues, while 4% of white Americans said the same in the Gallup survey measuring perspectives on the most important issues facing Americans.
That marks a 10 percentage point increase among blacks from a year ago before confrontations between unarmed African-American men and law enforcement in cities across the nation put race relations front and center in the national discourse. Among whites, the ranking jumped just 3 percentage points.
The poll was completed before police say a white man killed nine people in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., early Thursday morning. The instance was described as a “hate crime” by Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen.
Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, an activist and author, who organized groups in Ferguson in August 2014, is not surprised by the findings.
“In terms of the broader public, it’s always been critical of people of African descent,” Sekou said. “Ferguson highlighted the contradiction in a way that demanded attention in a certain way.”
Sekou said he thought the killings in Charleston were not a case of an unstable individual acting out, but an instance indicative of a larger issue of race relations in the U.S.
“What we saw highlighted an immoral system,” Sekou said.
Get the rest of the story at USA Today.
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